Black Friday marked the beginning of the busy holiday sale...
Read Article
Happy Sunday, folks! Thanks for stopping by for the Weekend...
Read Article
Google has been synonymous with “search” for many years now,...
Read Article
In an effort to move as far away from the...
Read Article
Windows 8, Microsoft’s latest home and mobile operating system for...
Read Article Modern web browsers like Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari...
Read Article Mozilla, the software company behind leading web-browser Firefox, announced today...
Read ArticleThis year is shaping up to be a big one in the mobile space. iOS and Android are still going strong, Windows Phone 8 is set to make a big push, and BlackBerry OS 10 devices will make their way onto carriers in the near future. We even caught a glimpse of Canonical’s Ubuntu Phone OS. It begs the question: will the market be receptive to even more mobile OS options?
Mozilla seems to think so, as today it outed two developer phones for its Firefox OS — the Keon model and the Peak model. Both will run a preview of Firefox OS, and Mozilla hopes both will be available sometime in February.
June 18th of 2008 was a very big day for me and millions of savvy Internet users around the world. Although never being the kind of person to get overly excited for release dates, I took a special exception for this event; getting up early and immediately firing up my computer in sheer anticipation of the release ahead of me. What was I so excited to get my hands on? It wasn’t a video game, it wasn’t a fruit-branded mobile handset, and it wasn’t a new album. I was waiting rather anxiously for the 3.0 release of the Mozilla Firefox web-browser, which many at the time saw as the best browser for hardcore and casual Internet users alike. Having freed myself from the shackles of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer only a few months earlier, getting my hands on the latest Firefox release was the only thing on my mind that morning.
Now, since then my love for Firefox has definitely dimmed down quiet a bit, and with the obsessive phase behind me I really don’t get excited for any releases of anything anymore. But when it comes to Firefox, my care about each update is night and day from what what it was only a few years ago. Especially with the new rapid-paced release cycle that has drawn criticism from all sides, no single update of the browser feels as “special” as it once would have.
On June 17th of 2008, three years and less than two weeks ago, Mozilla Corporation released the 3.0 version of the Firefox web browser; a promising and steadily growing web browser than many people, myself included, thought would finally take a stab at the dominance held by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. I remember the day well because I, a die-hard Firefox 2 user, sat at my desk constantly refreshing the download page in anticipation of the Firefox 3 release. Through a thread on Digg (the fact that Digg was still popular at the time probably gives you a better feel for how long ago this was) I found a link to a copy of the setup executable for the then legendary web browser. Admittedly, I was probably a bit crazy to have been obsessively wasting my time trying to get my hands on the 3.0 release, but I know for a fact that I wasn’t alone. People from around the world were just as eager as I was to get their hands on the latest offerings as well.
What’s my point? Just over three years ago, the release of a new Firefox version was a big deal; the last major release (2.0) having been released about a year and a half earlier in October of 2006. But earlier this year, Mozilla introduced a new release cycle that put the release of Firefox 7 on the calendar by the end of 2011. While many have viewed this move as invaluable in competing with the constant releases of Google’s Chrome web browser, the rapid paced release cycle of the software has begun to cause concerns with network and system administrators.
